The Big Picture - 3. What a Strange Country | Do We Get to Win This Time?

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

In the late ’70s, ‘The Deer Hunter’ and ‘Coming Home’ offer two very different visions of Vietnam—and become unexpected hits. Together, they’d bring the war to the mainstream—and to the Oscars. Host: Brian Raftery  Producers: Devon Manze, Mike Wargon, Amanda Dobbins, and Vikram Patel Sound Design: Bobby Wagner  Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville  All interviews for this series were conducted before the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone, if you're enjoying our show, you might also like some of the other narrative podcasts here at The Ringer. Want more history in your life? Try 22 Goals, a chronicle of the Men's World Cup told through the lens of 22 of the most iconic goals ever scored in the tournament. Spoiler alert, it's about a lot more than just soccer. Or maybe, like me, you just can't get enough of pop culture history. If that's the case, check out Just Like Us, a deep dive into

the tabloid magazine era. Not quite sick of my voice yet? Well, in Gene and Roger, I dive into the careers and legacies of legendary movie critics Siskel and Ebert. Two thumbs up for shameless self-promotion. Thanks for listening. A quick note about this episode. Some of the language you'll be hearing includes offensive terms used to describe people of color. They're included here to illustrate certain perspectives and norms of the early 70s. You'll also hear audio from a few violent movie scenes, which may not be suitable for all listeners. One spring day in the mid-70s, a screenwriter named Derek Washburn had a strange encounter in the woods. At the time, Washburn was kicking around ideas for a movie about Vietnam.

I had a huge feeling about wanting to do something about lower middle class people. Because the war was going to be fought by these people. Washburn had been developing the story for a while now, working with a young, eccentric writer-director named Michael Cimino. But they hadn't yet figured out who their main characters would be. So Washburn decided to take a weekend trip to a property he owned in rural Massachusetts. He was clearing out brush when, suddenly, Washburn realized he wasn't alone. It was a guy in a full camo outfit with a gun sitting on a log watching me. Never said anything for 15 minutes.

Washburn tensed up. Was he in danger? He had a decision to make, and quick. Time to get far away or very close. Washburn chose very close and decided to approach. I think he was a vet and he was broke and he had a wife and kids and he was really discouraged. Later on, he told Cimino about it. And Mike jumped on that and said, oh yeah, man, we'll do something to deer hunting.

It was an impulse decision, one of many to come during the long, twisting production of a film that would evolve, painfully, into The Deer Hunter. The movie followed three blue-collar hunting buddies from Pennsylvania who go off to war. Before that happens, though, the three friends get hammered at a wedding, and one of them, played by Christopher Walken, talks about what lies ahead.

I love this fucking place. I know that sounds crazy, but if anything happens, Mike, don't leave me over there. You've got to, you've got to, just don't leave me. You've got to promise me that, Mike. Everything about The Deer Hunter would be oversized. It ran nearly three hours long, following its characters from Steel Town, Pennsylvania to the battlefields of Vietnam. Its cast was just as expansive, featuring Robert De Niro, John Cazale,

John Savage, and Meryl Streep. And there were big blow-ups throughout production, thanks to Cimino, a genius who seemed to thrive on creating friction. Mike is a fantastic director. And, you know, what a son of a bitch. But what are you going to do? When The Deer Hunter finally opened in late 1978,

it was a minor miracle, partly because everyone survived the production, but mostly because The Deer Hunter existed at all. After years of relegating Vietnam mostly to low-budget westerns or blaxploitation flicks, the major studios were finally trying to bring the war to life. And The Deer Hunter wasn't alone. By 1978, the U.S. had been out of Vietnam for three years. The war was by no means resolved, but Hollywood believed moviegoers had been given enough time and enough distance to finally reflect on what Vietnam had done to America. A war that had lived mainly on TV screens was finally ready for the big screen.

It was long overdue. Which may explain why that same year saw the release of another high-profile Vietnam film, a romantic drama called Coming Home. Like The Deer Hunter, it had seen its share of behind-the-scenes struggles. And it also had an A-list cast,

with Jane Fonda starring as a VA hospital volunteer whose loyalties are divided between two Vietnam vets, her frustrated husband, played by Bruce Dern, and the disabled sergeant, played by John Voight. When I was a kid, I used to jump in my mother's kitchen and touch the ceiling. She used to get pissed off because I'd leave my handprints on the ceiling, you know. It's funny. People look at me, they see something else, but they don't see who I am. The Deer Hunter and Coming Home were epics,

both of them haunting and exhausting in their own ways. And while the two films offered differing visions of Vietnam and of America, together they'd bring the war to the mainstream and to the Oscars. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery. And this is Do We Get to Win This Time?

How Hollywood Made the Vietnam War. Tom Mount was in his 20s when he began working at Universal Pictures in 1973. It was a transitional period for Hollywood. New blood was coming into the studio system. But an older generation of moguls, one that included Mount's boss, the legendary Universal head Lou Wasserman, was still in power. I felt that I was very, very lucky to have a job at Universal at all. And ridiculously lucky that they let me make pictures. So I felt

like I was on a 30-second option all the time. And the minute Mr. Wasserman was unhappy enough, I'd be gone. That lasted 13 years, by the way. I was there forever. Mount had been involved with the protest movement

before getting into the film business. He'd been a member of two leading anti-war groups, the Students for a Democratic Society and the Indochina Peace Campaign, where he worked alongside Jane Fonda. Mount was part of a group of Hollywood newcomers with backgrounds in politics or activism. They were determined to make movies

that reflected the values of their generation. But not long after walking onto the Universal lot, Mount discovered that the legendary studio and some of the people running it were still living in the past. They were very old-fashioned. When I started there, man, the company still had 800 actors under full-time contract.

The fuck do you do with 800 actors? As mythic as the late 60s and early 70s have become for film lovers, and it was an amazing period for smart, vibrant movies, the big studios were still behind the times, logistically and culturally. Sure, you had movies like Easy Rider, the daring 1969 biker flick about a group of young outsiders who journey across a broken America.

But there were also countless drab dramas and these dopey, who-asked-for-this kind of comedies. By then, the film industry was more than a half century old, and some studio execs had been in power for decades. Their resistance to change showed in the movies they championed and the ones they fought against. Case in point, after Mount became president of production,

he greenlit a low-budget 1976 comedy called Car Wash. It had a multiracial cast, including Richard Pryor and the Pointer Sisters. Not everyone at the studio was thrilled. The head of distribution, who was a 70-year-old cracker from Texas who'd been with the company for 30 years,

turned to me about 15 minutes in and started to walk out. And he said, I just want you to know, young man, we don't release Negro pictures. That's an example of the culture that Mount and many of his younger peers had found themselves a part of. But a revolution was coming, whether the old guard liked it or not. It was overdue in Hollywood and Easy Rider.

It took five years or something for that to sort of saturate through the culture and make it clear to people that owned studios and ran studios that the counterculture was becoming mainstream culture and the movies are nothing if they're not touching you. I had a sign on my desk for years when I was at the studio that said, make me laugh, make me cry, make me think, make me come or leave me alone. And that's what moviemaking's all about.

One project that got Mount's attention at Universal was The Deer Hunter. The movie's origin story is tangled, even by the standards of big studio Hollywood, where movies can take years to come together. But here's the compressed version. In the mid-1970s, a British company called EMI Films bought the rights to The Man Who Came to Play, a script about two hustlers who set up rigged Russian roulette games in Vietnam. The Man Who Came to Play soon found its way to Cimino, a commercial director turned filmmaker who'd recently directed the Oscar-nominated action comedy Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

Cimino wanted to take the Russian roulette scene and spin it into an entirely new movie about Vietnam. That's where Washburn came in. He was a playwright who'd met Cimino in the early 70s, when they worked on the script for the sci-fi cult film Silent Running. As Washburn remembers, Cimino was prone to bold statements and gestures. Even then, there was an air of mystery around the director. He had a Rolls Royce.

I didn't know anyone who had a Rolls Royce. In addition to money, Cimino had momentum, thanks to the success of Thunderbolt. That meant EMI had to commit to the Russian roulette script quickly, or risk losing the rights. After several phone calls discussing the plot, Washburn found himself in a hotel just off the Sunset Strip. He and Cimino spent three days there, jamming on an outline.

It was a fantastic experience. It really was. We became one. And the whole thing just flowed out in three days. And then I went into my hotel room to write the script. And every day at five o'clock, Mike would send in a messenger who would take the day's output, you know, which I didn't have any copies of anything. It never occurred to me that that was a thing you might do. By all accounts, the original script for The Man Who Came to Play

was stripped away of every element, except for the Russian roulette scene. That moment would wind up halfway into The Deer Hunter, after the three buddies, played by De Niro, Walken, and Savage, are imprisoned. Soon, De Niro and Walken are forced at gunpoint to play Russian roulette for their captors. If you saw The Deer Hunter in the theater, or if you caught it on cable or in a history class, this scene would stay with you long afterward. It still rattles me now, decades after I first watched it.

You've got an empty chamber and I've got it. Put an empty chamber and I've got it. Go ahead. Move! Move! Move! God damn it! It's going to be all right, Nicky. Go ahead, shoot. Shoot, Nicky!

This sequence, nauseating, drawn out, and unbelievably bleak, would fuel the rest of The Deer Hunter. All three men survive the ordeal, but Walken's character becomes so addicted to the thrill of Russian roulette, he stays behind in Vietnam, seeking out underground games for money. The Russian roulette scene was controversial from the get-go. To some, it dehumanized the Vietnamese, portraying them as nameless, bloodthirsty brutes. Others pointed out there was no Russian roulette in Vietnam. It all shows how a real-life event can be rewritten when sensation trumps actual information.

I mean, because of the deer hunter, I thought Russian roulette in Vietnam was a real thing for years. And I'm sure I'm not alone. According to Washburn, accuracy was never the goal. No, it's a metaphor. People have so much trouble with that. Just the experience of living in a state of non-stop terror for however long they're captured and they're being tortured with this stuff.

I mean, really, the deer hunter was designed to get to that scene. Washburn and Cimino's script got to Tom Mount, who by the late 70s had been with Universal for a few years. He knew the film's violence, spectacle, and still taboo subject matter made it risky. So Universal would split the cost, about $9 million, with the film's British producers. Everybody had a certain amount of trepidation. But by that time, I'd made a few films for the company that made some money. And this is the tail end of the old studio system. So you built up a certain amount of credit. If you could make money appear over the transom,

which was the standard, then you get to do a few things that you really wanted to do that everybody thought was nuts. After Mount convinced Lou Wasserman, sorry, Mr. Wasserman, that The Deer Hunter could work, filmmaking got underway in the summer of 1977.

It would be an international production, shooting across four U.S. states, with Thailand serving as a stand-in for Vietnam. But at least one key player would not be along for the ride. After he and Cimino had finished their writing spree, Washburn was asked to meet with the director at an L.A. restaurant. Joining them would be Joanne Corelli, Cimino's producer and protector.

It's just some little hole up on the strip. And we sit down and I guess I say something like, well, what's next? And Joanne Corelli leans across the table, looks at me and says, well, Derek, it's fuck off time. Here's your tickets. You're out of here. One quick note. I couldn't get a hold of Corelli for this podcast, but in a 2022 biography of Cimino,

she denied Washburn's account of his firing. Either way, Washburn was out. It was a shocking end to what had been, up until that point, a smooth collaboration. But it was proof of just how ruthless Chimino could be. And it sent a message to anyone who dared get in the way of the deer hunter. It's fuck-off time. Coming Home had been in the works for five years before it began shooting in 1977. And throughout that friction-filled time,

there was one figure whose persistence brought Coming Home to life, Jane Fonda. In the late 60s and early 70s, Fonda's career was on an amazing run. It included everything from the fluffy sci-fi hit Barbarella to Clute, a New York noir that won Fonda an Oscar, and introduced one of the top three on-screen hairstyles of all time. But Fonda's movie stardom was increasingly overshadowed by her opposition to the Vietnam War. In the early 70s, she and a small troupe of actors and musicians, including Donald Sutherland, toured military bases near the Pacific Islands, performing songs and comedy sketches. Those shows would later be captured in a documentary titled FTA. I went down to that base

they took one look at my face and ran out in order to bar me I said Foxtrot Tango Alpha Free the Army If you didn't catch that last part, they're singing Free the Army. But as you can probably guess, the F in FTA doesn't actually stand for free.

Anyway, by 1972, Fonda's anti-war efforts had become so well-known, she was asked to visit North Vietnam, an invitation she accepted. Symbolically, this was seismic. Fonda wasn't just a major U.S. celebrity. She was also the daughter of Henry Fonda, a World War II veteran who became a Hollywood icon, playing can-do good guys in such classics as The Grapes of Wrath and My Darling Clementine. Jane Fonda was part of an American dynasty, and now she was traveling to a region at war with her own country.

While in North Vietnam, Fonda met with American POWs and broadcast messages to U.S. pilots over Vietnamese airwaves, imploring them to stop their bombing missions. Reporters followed Fonda's every move, including her trip afterward to Paris, where she held an emotional press conference. I shed many tears in Vietnam. I cried every day in Vietnam.

It was never for the Vietnamese. It's impossible to cry for the Vietnamese. They sing, they dance, they create. I didn't cry for the Vietnamese. I cried for the Americans. Because although the bombs are falling on Vietnam, it's an American tragedy. Back in America, Fonda's trip was greeted by outrage, especially after a photo circulated of her sitting in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun pointed toward the sky. One U.S. congressman called her a traitor. A former World War II POW called for a mass boycott, which he called Operation Turn Off Jane Fonda.

And the Justice Department was asked by Congress to investigate whether Fonda's behavior had violated U.S. laws. The DOJ declined, but the fallout from Fonda's visit, and from comments she made afterward, would follow her for decades. She addressed that trip in an interview with Barbara Walters in 1988. Even then, protesters were still sometimes showing up near Fonda's film sets, enraged by what she'd done in Vietnam. What were you doing climbing on that gun? That was a thoughtless and careless thing to have done. I take full responsibility for it. I was not a kid. You know, the responsibility is mine. I am proud of most of what I did and I am very sorry for some of what I did.

To this day, there are Vietnam vets who resent Fonda because of her actions in 1972. Here's Lieutenant Colonel Michael Lee Lanning, the author we met two episodes ago. I greatly admire Jane Fonda as an actress. As a human being, she's a piece of shit. Fonda's trip didn't just anger American troops. It frightened movie execs and theater owners. Her visit to North Vietnam arrived the same month as FTA, and the documentary, which was already a tough sell to begin with,

quickly disappeared from theaters. Fonda would later say she was graylisted in Hollywood, making it a struggle for her to find work. Film producer and executive Paula Weinstein, who's known Fonda for decades, saw the animosity toward the actor and her response to it firsthand. People would start screaming at me if they didn't like what Jane said. And I think it's one of the things that Jane's been very open about and heavily criticized for and has made every version of amends

that a person can make. And some will never forgive her and others absolutely do. After her trip, Fonda doubled down on her activism. Around this time, she met a young organizer named Bruce Gilbert. He'd been a student at UC Berkeley in the late 60s, a period when young people were mobilizing against the Vietnam War. The draft was going on, and I started to attend more rallies and teach-ins and so on,

and then started participating in marches and demonstrations. During those years, Gilbert learned how to organize and how to raise money. He also saw movies like Easy Rider, a film that convinced him his generation might soon have a place in Hollywood. I did things that, in retrospect, were kind of good initial training for becoming a film producer, although that was not my intention. Through his anti-war efforts, Gilbert got to know Ron Kovic,

a Marine who'd been paralyzed during his second tour of Vietnam and who'd become a fixture at rallies. In his speech, he had a key phrase in there which went something along the lines of, I lost my body to regain my mind. Kovic's speech stuck with Gilbert.

It also had an impact on Fonda, who'd gotten to know both men through anti-war events. She and Gilbert began kicking around an idea for a film, one that took inspiration from Kovic's speech. It was about a love triangle between a young woman and two returning Vietnam veterans. One who'd come home physically unharmed, but deeply angry. Another who'd return paralyzed, but more emotionally open than ever before. To get the movie going, Fonda set up a production company called IPC for Indochina Peace Campaign. And she asked Gilbert to work on a script. I'm not even sure I had even read a screenplay at that point.

Fortunately, I didn't know how difficult it was to write a film, much less make a film, at least a good one, that it's like, yeah, that would be great. I like movies. Fonda worried Gilbert wouldn't know how to write for a female character. So she brought in a collaborator, Nancy Dowd. She and Gilbert interviewed several Vietnam veterans as research. They eventually wound up with a 240-page epic titled Buffalo Ghost,

which was developed with the idea that Fonda would be the star. By that point, plenty of Americans would have been happy if Fonda stayed away from the topic of Vietnam forever. Instead, she was rushing toward it. But for much of the early and mid-70s, Fonda's Vietnam movie, which was eventually retitled Coming Home, was in a constant state of flux. Gilbert and Dowd's script was way too long,

and multiple screenwriters would be brought in to revise it. That process took years, during which time, the Coming Home team learned how hard it was to make a movie about Vietnam. When they asked the U.S. military about using equipment and facilities for their movie, a perk John Wayne had enjoyed for the Green Berets, the filmmakers were turned down. And while talking to the press, one Veterans Administration doctor gave a draft of the Coming Home screenplay a scathing review. It portrays veterans as weak and purposeless, with no admirable qualities, embittered against their country, addicted to alcohol and marijuana, and as unbelievably foul-mouthed and devoid of conventional morality in sexual matters.

Oh, right. Sexual matters. Coming Home features an explicit love scene between Fonda and the wheelchair-bound Voight, a moment that freaked out some studio execs. They weren't sure if moviegoers would pay to see it. In fact, they weren't sure people would pay to see Fonda at all. She was a controversial star, making a movie about a controversial war. At least one movie chain owner warned the Coming Home team that Fonda was so radioactive, some theaters would refuse to show the film altogether. After languishing for years, Coming Home finally found a studio in United Artists, which would

provide a bare-bones budget of just over $5 million, about half of the Deer Hunter's projected cost. The cast would feature Bruce Dern as Fonda's angry husband and John Voight as the paraplegic veteran, a role turned down by De Niro, Al Pacino, and Sylvester Stallone. The producers even landed an A-list director, Hal Ashby. A few years earlier, Ashby had directed Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail, about a pair of Navy officers assigned to bring a young recruit to prison during the Vietnam War. The Last Detail was moving and funny and rebellious, just what Coming Home needed. Ashby was offered the gig when producers visited his Malibu home, where they found him stoned in

a hot tub. Once he read the script, Ashby knew changes would have to be made. Originally, Coming Home ended with Fonda's angry husband taking hostages and going on a wild chase. That wouldn't work for Ashby. He'd spoken to several vets, and he knew they were sick of movies that portrayed them as damaged goods. Ashby told the press, quote, They were always being depicted as totally crazy. They were saying, give us a break. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings.

Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Tom Mound started getting updates on the Deer Hunter not long after production began. The news wasn't good. Cimino was behind schedule, over budget, and beyond control. Michael was a full-time adventure. To be fair, not all of The Deer hunters' problems were Chimino's fault. In Thailand, the filmmakers were forced to give back vehicles and weaponry they'd rented from the government

when they were needed for a military coup. A bloodless coup, but still, not your typical onset headache. Meanwhile, Robert De Niro and John Savage, filming an escape scene on a bridge over the famous River Kwai, had to jump into the water last minute to avoid being sliced by out-of-control helicopter blades. Yet the bigger issue was Cimino's maximalist approach to, well, everything. The first act of The Deer Hunter includes an elaborate Russian Orthodox wedding that serves as a send-off for its heroes.

Cimino filled a church with actors and extras and filmed them endlessly, often improvising along the way, until some in the cast simply gave up and collapsed on the floor. Michael would get obsessed and want to shoot something over and over and over. This thing could easily have gone to 25 million bucks and could easily have been the Cleopatra of its moment.

Things only got harder after shooting wrapped. Cimino's original cut of The Deer Hunter was nearly four hours, making it pretty much unreleasable. Universal secretly hired superstar editor Verna Fields, who'd recently won an Oscar for Jaws, to cut the movie down, a fact the studio kept hidden from Cimino. When the director objected,

Universal agreed to test Cimino's version at a theater in Detroit. By then, The Deer Hunter, which had gone nearly $5 million over budget, had attracted the attention of Universal honcho Lou Wasserman, who flew to the screening to see how his investment had turned out. It was a very unhappy night. When the lights came back up, more than half the audience had walked out already. And worse than that, just to make life insane, on the way back to his hotel,

Mr. Wasserman got trapped in a stuck elevator. I mean, you just, Brian, you shoot yourself. You know, what are you going to do? They got their answer when Universal screened a shorter version of the film, now just under three hours long, in Chicago, where it got a huge response. Cimino may have driven everyone crazy, but even the director's opponents had to admit that Deer Hunter was something special. A visually sweeping, emotionally blunt film that never flinches from the American soldier's pain.

The movie has two climaxes, both of them ballsy. In the first, De Niro attempts to bring Walken home from Vietnam, only to watch him die as they play one last round of Russian roulette. Mickey, you remember the trees? Remember all the different ways in the trees? Remember that?

Remember? Huh? The mountains? You remember all that? One shot. One that? One shot. One shot. One shot. Yeah.

Yeah. Afterward, back in Pennsylvania, Walken's friends gather for one last send off they don't say much but before the credits roll they take a seat at a crowded dinner table and quietly sing Meryl Streep carries the tune

God bless America Land that I love Stand beside her And guide her Through the night with the light from above That ending confounded some viewers when The Deer Hunter finally made it to theaters. Was it a sincere moment of jingoistic pride?

Or was it sneering at the Americans who still loved the country that had damaged them? Cimino died in 2016 and didn't talk much about the deer hunter in later years. But the director explained the scene during a DVD audio commentary. This was a terrible risk to take. I think in that moment it was not very politically correct

to express any degree of patriotism in America. This is a family. This is what movie is about. How does a family survive? How do ordinary people find the courage to go on? But they do. They do. Nearly 50 years after his deer hunter adventures began, Derek Washburn reflected on the God

Bless America scene and what Vietnam meant to America. This whole country is so driven by its mythic proportion. Washburn said God Bless America encapsulated that American myth. And the characters in the movie got so exhausted, they just kind of sank into it. They're chosen now to do their part in the myth. And it's going to be terrible. It's going to be awful. But that's their duty.

What a strange country. Even with its cast and director on board, Coming Home faced countless setbacks. One of its many credited screenwriters, Waldo Salt, who'd won an Oscar for the groundbreaking Midnight Cowboy, suffered a heart attack before finishing his draft. Ashby and Fonda, meanwhile, argued about her sex scene, with Ashby at one point storming off the set. And because Coming Home got underway without a

finished script, several scenes were improvised. But when the movie arrived in early 1978, it was clear that Coming Home's shambolic production had paid off. You can sense it in the film's seemingly unrehearsed moments, like the opening scene, in which a group of disabled veterans, played by actual survivors of the war, talk about Vietnam. I can't see anybody saying that after going and coming back to say that they would go again. I just can't deal with that. No, no, no. Wait a minute.

The reason I can see it is that some of us, not all of us, some of us need to justify to ourselves what the fuck we did there. So if we come back and say, well, we did was a waste, what happened to us was a waste, some of us can't live with it. During filming, Ashby's team had come up with a new ending. Instead of finishing with Bruce Dern's angry veteran

going on a crime spree, the finale of Coming Home features Voight's character giving a passionate speech against the war to a group of high school students. And I'm telling you, it ain't like it's in the movies. That's all I want to tell you, because I didn't have a choice. When I was your age, all I got was some guy standing up like that, man, and giving me a lot of bullshit, man, which I caught. I was really in good shape then, man. I was a captain of the football team, and I wanted to be a war hero, man. I wanted faces of the young boys in the audience. Boys who were probably around the same age as Voight's character when he went to war.

Their expressions are blank. And I don't feel good about it. Throughout this scene, Coming Home cuts to Dern's character, who's lost his wife and his bearings. As Tim Buckley's haunting ballad Once I Was plays in the background, Dern's despondent vet heads to the beach, where he strips naked and walks into the ocean. The whole thing is heartbreaking.

One of those endings I think about all the time. Dern talked about the scene during a 1978 appearance on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. At the end of this movie, you just kind of sit there and you really don't know quite how to react, and that's exactly what happened when the war was over. Unfortunately, because of Vietnam, the way it ended, there was no VJ Day, because there was nothing to celebrate.

That's for sure. While the last moments of The Deer Hunter may have struck some viewers as ambiguous, coming home made its anti-war feelings clear. That created some problems for United artists Mike Medavoy, who'd greenlit the film and got pushback from within his own company. Yeah, marketing team said I was a traitor for having made the movie.

But the movie, you know, was such a good movie that I think, you know, people let it go. Still, Coming Home wouldn't be an easy movie to sell. In the late 70s, a few other Vietnam-related dramas would make it to the theaters, though their marketing would largely play down the war to avoid turning off moviegoers. In early 1977, Burt Lancaster starred in Twilight's Last Gleaming about a former Vietnam POW who holds the U.S. missile silo hostage.

His mission? To blackmail the president into releasing documents proving the U.S. knew Vietnam was unwinnable. While inside the base, Lancaster's character meets a fellow POW, played by Richard Jekyll. He tells him there's no sense fighting the system, that Americans simply don't want to know the truth about Vietnam. You haven't learned a thing, have you? Still going up against a stacked deck. This time I'm going to blow it wide open.

This time? Hey, when are you going to blow it wide open. This time? Hey, when are you going to wake up and smell the coffee? Nobody gives a Chinese fuck. You could climb up in a Capitol building. Wouldn't bring sweat on a pig's ass. Twilight's Last Gleaming was directed by Robert Aldrich, who'd recently worked with Lancaster on a movie called Alzano's Raid, a harsh Western tale of cavalrymen versus Native

Americans. Much like Soldier Blue, which we talked about last episode, Alzana's Raid was clearly an allegory for Vietnam, one that took a dim view of the conflict. Not surprising, given that both Lancaster and Aldrich were longtime liberals. In Twilight's Last Gleaming, the two men's anti-war feelings were fully on display. But the movie's trailers and TV ads didn't even mention the word Vietnam. Neither did the commercials for Heroes, a 1977 drama starring Henry Winkler as a Vietnam vet struggling with the aftershocks of combat. Instead, Heroes was sold as a wacky rom-com with the Fonz and Sally Field. Sometimes, in the oddest places, in the strangest ways,

strangers can become lovers. Heroes. Rated PG. Studio executives knew Vietnam would be a turnoff, so they simply avoided mentioning it at all, even when selling a film clearly aimed at younger viewers who'd been affected by the war. In May 1978, Warner Brothers released Big Wednesday, an extraordinary coming-of-age epic about a bunch of surf buddies,

one of whom is killed in Vietnam. It was written and directed by John Milius, whom you'll be hearing about later, and it featured a moment in which three of the surfers, played by Gary Busey, William Catt, and Jan Michael Vincent, visit a cemetery to say goodbye to their friend. Boy, I never thought old Waxer would end up in the boneyard. I wonder if he was scared when he died.

How about you, Jack? You scared over there? Yeah. Yes, I was, yeah. Vietnam was in the background of Big Wednesday, but the movie was sold as a feel-good surfer flick. That kind of cover-up would have been impossible with The Deer Hunter, which tackled Vietnam head-on,

and the marketing for the film would have to be just as direct. In late 1978, in order to help sell The Deer Hunter, Universal hired Alan Carr, the famed producer and promoter who'd just turned Saturday Night Fever into a smash. Carr snuck The Deer Hunter into a few theaters in December to make sure it qualified for the Oscars and convinced the New York Times to write a huge profile of Cimino. As Tom Mount remembers, that story almost stopped The Deer Hunter in its tracks. In that interview, he claimed that this picture was inspired by his experiences as a Green Beret medic.

Cimino also claimed to have signed up for service right around the time of the 1968 Tet Offensive, presumably out of a surge of patriotism. I get a call from this reporter later that evening. He says, this is what the director told me. Is this true? Mount knew Cimino's claims were bogus. So he went to his boss, Lou Wasserman, and explained the situation. And he said, so what does the reporter need? And I said, well, the reporter will need a credible Pentagon or Army source to back up what

Cimino told him. As it turned out, Wasserman had a lot of connections in Washington. On his giant work desk at Universal, you could find framed photos of the studio chief shaking hands with the last few presidents. A day or two goes by. I get a call from Mr. Wasserman's secretary who says, here's a number at the U.S. Army Public Information Office in the Pentagon. Give this to the reporter at the Times. So I did. And he called the Department of Defense and spoke to some senior Army spokesperson who backed up Cimino's story. That's right. According to Mount, his powerful boss convinced the Pentagon to vouch for Cimino. And the New York Times wound up printing the director's wild claims.

We'll never know what strings Wasserman pulled. He died decades ago. But the panic over Cimino's lies proves how important The Deer Hunter was to the studio, and how much the movie had to be protected. The Deer Hunter's latest crisis had been averted. But as the movie went wide in early 1979, there was still the matter of reviews. The Deer Hunter did well with film critics, but not with some war critics, who were troubled by how the movie pitted virtuous Americans against faceless, amoral Vietnamese.

Journalist John Pilger wrote a New York Times column attacking The Deer Hunter as racist, facetious, and filled with, quote, John Wayne-like heroics. Meanwhile, Peter Arnett, who won a Pulitzer for covering Vietnam, described the film's Russian roulette scene as, quote, morally irresponsible. And he wasn't alone in his frustrations. I remember where I was when I saw the movie and I was so outraged. Paula Weinstein. I mean, I can now look at it and think what an amazingly made movie. But at the time, the depiction of the North Vietnamese made me absolutely crazy. I was admiring of the performances.

I was admiring of this. And I was so angry about the irresponsibility of how the Vietnamese were portrayed. Coming Home was less controversial, a surprise given there was still so much animosity toward its star. In fact, just a month before the movie opened, graffiti saying, Kill the Traitor Fonda appeared in Midtown Manhattan. But Coming Home turned out to be one of Fonda's more successful films of the decade. While they weren't exactly blockbusters, both Coming Home and The Deer Hunter did well at the box office. Maybe it was their star power. Maybe it was the

careful marketing campaigns. Coming Home's trailer played up the romantic triangle, while The Deer Hunter was sold on ecstatic reviews. Whatever the reasons, Coming Home and The Deer Hunter were breakthroughs. Hit movies that reflected the differing attitudes toward Vietnam. Coming Home viewed the war as a failure, one that ravaged everything it touched and which now had to be discussed openly and honestly so that future Vietnams could be avoided. The Deer Hunter treated Vietnam as a necessary evil, the kind of trial Americans must endure from time to time to test their mettle and ensure their might. Something to be accepted stoically and quietly. But that's just how I see these movies. From the moment they arrived in theaters,

everyone viewed Coming Home and the Deer Hunter in their own ways, including Oscar voters. On April 9th, 1979, the 51st Annual Academy Awards began with a dramatic pre-show. Outside L.A.'s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, more than a dozen protesters were arrested after fighting with police. They'd shown up to voice their displeasure with the deer hunter, which they accused of being nothing more than a racist justification of the war. Viewers that night didn't see the scuffle.

But to those who paid attention to the race, there was a built-in tension between the deer hunter and coming home. They were competing in major categories, including Best Picture. Around Hollywood, rumors swirled of a rivalry, maybe even a resentment, between the two filmmaking camps. Here's Tom Mount again.

Yeah, there was rivalry, but there always is in Hollywood. Deer hunter was overly aggressive and kind of testosterone-laden and myopic about the subtleties of the war in Vietnam, didn't have the kind of war sensitivity that Coming Home had. Bruce Gilbert says the competition

between the two films was exaggerated. But decades later, he still holds strong feelings about The Deer Hunter. I thought it was an abomination. I thought it was great filmmaking, and the acting in it was kind of superb. But the content of the movie was... nobody did Russian roulette. The whole thing was completely inaccurate as far as being anything representative of the Vietnam War. The pitting of the deer hunter against coming home

was one of the night's big narratives. But the legacy of Vietnam hung over the Oscars in other ways, some of them imperceptible. The best adapted screenplay trophy went to Midnight Express, whose writer was a young veteran named Oliver Stone. He'd been working on two big Vietnam projects, one titled Born on the Fourth of July, and another called The Platoon.

But at the moment, both were stuck in development limbo. Then there was Francis Ford Coppola, who was putting the finishing touches on his own war epic, Apocalypse Now. Coppola would eventually present the best director statue to someone he called his paisan, Michael Cimino. By the time Cimino went up to accept the trophy, Coming Home had already earned three Oscars,

acting awards for both Fonda and Voight, as well as Best Original Screenplay, which went to Salt, Nancy Dowd, and Robert C. Jones. The Deer Hunter, meanwhile, had picked up a couple of technical awards, as well as a Best Supporting Actor trophy for Walken. It was becoming clear that one of these two films was heading toward the big prize. So it was fitting that the guy presenting the Best Picture award that night was someone with his own Vietnam experience, at least on screen, John Wayne. It was up to the Green Berets star

and his first major appearance since doctors found a malignant cancer in his stomach to give out the final award of the night. The Duke, who was 72 years old, got a standing ovation. Oscar first came to the Hollywood scene in 1928. So did I. We're both a little weather-beaten,

but we're still here and plan to be around for a whole lot longer. In reality, this would be Wayne's final public appearance. He died two months after handing out the evening's last award. And the winner is... The Deer Hunter. Cimino's comments were brief. I love you madly. Thank you. Decades later, on the Deer Hunter commentary track,

Cimino described how the rivalry between the two films finally came to a head. Albeit awkwardly. And then the next thing I knew, I was in an elevator with Jane Fonda. She had one and I had two, and she wouldn't even look at me. And I was trying to say congratulations, and she wouldn't even, she turned away from me. It was just two of us, and you could hear these things clinking, you know? Given Cimino's shaky relationship with the truth,

this could be complete bullshit, but it is a good story. Regardless, coming home in The Deer Hunter would be forever tied together. A pair of Vietnam films that were political, but never too preachy and made at a time when studio executives trusted the intelligence of their audience.

Plus, they'd both won multiple Oscars and sold a good number of tickets, feats no other Vietnam films had managed. Together, Coming Home and The Deer Hunter proved moviegoers were ready to re-engage with the war. That was reassuring to one of the men on the Oscar stage that night, a man who was about to release the maddest Vietnam film of the decade. If he could ever finish it. Next, on Do We Get to Win This Time. There were too many of us.

We had access to too many, too much money, too much equipment. And little by little, we went insane. This is Do We Get to Win This Time? How Hollywood Made the Vietnam War. Written and reported by me, Brian Raftery. The executive producers are Bill Simmons, Juliet Littman, and Sean Fennessy. Our story editor is Amanda Dobbins. The show was produced by Devin Manzi, Mike Wargon, and Vikram Patel. Fact-checking by Dan Comer. Copy editing by Craig Gaines. Thanks for listening.